Hello everyone 
New to this board, but not to forums in general.
I've reached a slight, but increasingly (as the months pass) major dilemma, with regards to my PC.
Here are the current full specs:
Case - Antec TX1088AMG
PSU - Antec SPII-480, which came with the case.
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (Rev 1.0)
CPU - AMD Athlon64 3500+
RAM - assorted sticks of DDR400 various brands all at pc3200 spec, 3x1Gb and 1x512mb
Graphics card - Club3D X800 RX - mine has a VGA, DVI and S-Video connectivity rather than the dual DVi as shown I have added a accelero s2
sound card - SB 5.1 Live! PCI card - Its old, but it does everything I need as I do not have a 7.1 speaker setup and do not do any audio editing whatsoever.
DVD/CD - Some black IDE Phillips one. More than happy with it and it has not let me down.
Screen - 32" HDTV (only 1080i and NOT p) connected via a DVI to HDMI cable.
HDDs - 1x IDE Samsung SP1203N in an IDE drive caddy - 120gb
1x SATA (with additional IDE power input) Hitatchi Deskstar HDS721616PLA380 - 160gb
1x IDE Maxtor 6L200P0 - 200GB
1x IDE Seagate Barracuda ST3120026A connected to SATA by means of a IDE to SATA converter
...and to be honest, I'm fairly happy with it. I run Windows XP Professional 64bit and the 64bit version of Ubuntu 8.10 in a dual boot machine.
Its just that Im not really sure where to go with it now. I dont have all that much money to blow willy nilly on a top-spec all new shiney bells and whistles machine. My partner has a long term illness which means she cant work so I am the only money earner, and at the moment, Im a contracted IT tech support person for t'London Underground (while we have been recruited to order and have been told that we will go permanent if we dont screw up after 6 months, it is still just a contracted position).
Im also trying to go as silent as possible after having invested in the passive GPU heatsink and I just installed one 92mm Typhoon fan and an 80mm one (both were selected after reading a table of fans against noise output). I don't have a CPU fan, but instead have the 92mm fan on the intake feeding cold air straight over the flat heatsink. I haven't noticed the CPU get higher than 35 degrees at any time (it got upto 50ish once, but that was because I was benchmarking and wanted to test if the CPU temperature monitoring software was working properly so I just took the CPU fan off and left it to warm up)
I'm not particularly fussed in overclocking it at the moment. My partner bought me 2 sticks of the 1gb RAM for christmas too so Im kinda reluctant to throw it out or change it. Im also not fussed in case modding and neon lights. I sit right in front of my PC and currently only have the HDD light plugged in as the original blue LEDs were blinding me. My case has a solid side panel anyway so Im not fussed in making it look pretty either.
I have looked at the highest spec CPU that my motherboard will take and it is a AMD 64x2 4800+ Toledo core (NOTE - that is a socket 939 and NOT an AM2) and the highest RAM it will take is 4gb. These however are going for £75 and up on eBay as they are getting rare now.
I think, that apart from the Graphics and Sound card, if I upgrade one bit (CPU, MoBo or RAM) then I will need to upgrade the rest of it.
I pretty much use my desktop for playing World of Warcraft (a little websurfing, playing music, watching DVDs, films and TV series) where I do the end level raids and such. I'm getting sick and tired of having less that ~10 fps during a boss fight and nowhere near even 40fps whilst I'm simply staring at a wall. I do have the graphics pretty much all turned up to full however, which I'm sure has something to do with it.
I'm fairly brand-loyal to Gigabyte for MoBo's as I have found them to be much better than other boards, though am willing to look elsewhere if told to. However, I will NOT buy Intel simply for their frankly disgusting over-use of the "Intel" noise in all their adverts since release, as well as other companies adverts which say the word "Intel" at any point therein (Dell or PcWorld for example). Call me a wierdo, but I'm standing by that decision unless there are strong arguments and an obvious monetary advantage in Intel's favour.
Other than that, I'm not sure really what to get or what to buy.
I need a motherboard that has 2 IDE connectors, or I need to buy some more adapters so can use SATA instead.
Can you provide some advice please?
Thanks.
New to this board, but not to forums in general.
I've reached a slight, but increasingly (as the months pass) major dilemma, with regards to my PC.
Here are the current full specs:
Case - Antec TX1088AMG
PSU - Antec SPII-480, which came with the case.
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 (Rev 1.0)
CPU - AMD Athlon64 3500+
RAM - assorted sticks of DDR400 various brands all at pc3200 spec, 3x1Gb and 1x512mb
Graphics card - Club3D X800 RX - mine has a VGA, DVI and S-Video connectivity rather than the dual DVi as shown I have added a accelero s2
sound card - SB 5.1 Live! PCI card - Its old, but it does everything I need as I do not have a 7.1 speaker setup and do not do any audio editing whatsoever.
DVD/CD - Some black IDE Phillips one. More than happy with it and it has not let me down.
Screen - 32" HDTV (only 1080i and NOT p) connected via a DVI to HDMI cable.
HDDs - 1x IDE Samsung SP1203N in an IDE drive caddy - 120gb
1x SATA (with additional IDE power input) Hitatchi Deskstar HDS721616PLA380 - 160gb
1x IDE Maxtor 6L200P0 - 200GB
1x IDE Seagate Barracuda ST3120026A connected to SATA by means of a IDE to SATA converter
...and to be honest, I'm fairly happy with it. I run Windows XP Professional 64bit and the 64bit version of Ubuntu 8.10 in a dual boot machine.
Its just that Im not really sure where to go with it now. I dont have all that much money to blow willy nilly on a top-spec all new shiney bells and whistles machine. My partner has a long term illness which means she cant work so I am the only money earner, and at the moment, Im a contracted IT tech support person for t'London Underground (while we have been recruited to order and have been told that we will go permanent if we dont screw up after 6 months, it is still just a contracted position).
Im also trying to go as silent as possible after having invested in the passive GPU heatsink and I just installed one 92mm Typhoon fan and an 80mm one (both were selected after reading a table of fans against noise output). I don't have a CPU fan, but instead have the 92mm fan on the intake feeding cold air straight over the flat heatsink. I haven't noticed the CPU get higher than 35 degrees at any time (it got upto 50ish once, but that was because I was benchmarking and wanted to test if the CPU temperature monitoring software was working properly so I just took the CPU fan off and left it to warm up)
I'm not particularly fussed in overclocking it at the moment. My partner bought me 2 sticks of the 1gb RAM for christmas too so Im kinda reluctant to throw it out or change it. Im also not fussed in case modding and neon lights. I sit right in front of my PC and currently only have the HDD light plugged in as the original blue LEDs were blinding me. My case has a solid side panel anyway so Im not fussed in making it look pretty either.
I have looked at the highest spec CPU that my motherboard will take and it is a AMD 64x2 4800+ Toledo core (NOTE - that is a socket 939 and NOT an AM2) and the highest RAM it will take is 4gb. These however are going for £75 and up on eBay as they are getting rare now.
I think, that apart from the Graphics and Sound card, if I upgrade one bit (CPU, MoBo or RAM) then I will need to upgrade the rest of it.
I pretty much use my desktop for playing World of Warcraft (a little websurfing, playing music, watching DVDs, films and TV series) where I do the end level raids and such. I'm getting sick and tired of having less that ~10 fps during a boss fight and nowhere near even 40fps whilst I'm simply staring at a wall. I do have the graphics pretty much all turned up to full however, which I'm sure has something to do with it.
I'm fairly brand-loyal to Gigabyte for MoBo's as I have found them to be much better than other boards, though am willing to look elsewhere if told to. However, I will NOT buy Intel simply for their frankly disgusting over-use of the "Intel" noise in all their adverts since release, as well as other companies adverts which say the word "Intel" at any point therein (Dell or PcWorld for example). Call me a wierdo, but I'm standing by that decision unless there are strong arguments and an obvious monetary advantage in Intel's favour.
Other than that, I'm not sure really what to get or what to buy.
I need a motherboard that has 2 IDE connectors, or I need to buy some more adapters so can use SATA instead.
Can you provide some advice please?
Thanks.
Last edited:
)